A literary academic can no more pass a bookstore than an alcoholic can pass a bar.

Power consists to a large extent in deciding what stories will be told.

Professors of literature collect books the way a ship collects barnacles, without seeming effort.

Unfortunately, power is something that women abjure once they perceive the great difference between the lives possible to men and to women...

With solitude, however, fervently it is desired and embraced, comes loneliness. T. H White, the author, offered advice to those in sadness -- learn something new.

To continue what one had been doing -- which was Dante's idea of hell -- is, I came to see, and the vision frightened me, easy in one's sixties.

Sometimes, the simple things are more fun and meaningful than all the banquets in the world ...

It all comes down to this: when you recognise your loneliness in another person, when you see desperation so familiar to yours written across someone else, you can’t just let them leave.

Moons and years pass by and are gone forever, but a beautiful moment shimmers through life a ray of light.

For me, it's not about masochism to talk about death. For me, it's about observing life through death, from the last point of it.

Whatever Nature undertakes, she can only accomplish it in a sequence. She never makes a leap.

I'm sort of in for a penny, in for a pound with Star Trek, It's my life at this point. To deny it would just be foolish.

You are beginning to see that any man to whom you can do favor is your friend, and that you can do a favor to almost anyone.

I suppose for whatever reason I actively welcome being put down, something which perhaps goes back to my upbringing - that accusation of not being worthy which could be laid at one's door.

This very moment I may, if I desire, become the friend of God.

I'm always doing what I can to look for and just feel out funny things that are happening in the scene and improvise off of them.